Microsoft’s new emulator could bring more games to Windows on Arm

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Microsoft is testing a big Windows on Arm update to let more x64 software and games run under Prism emulation on Copilot Plus PC with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus processors. The capability comes as part of the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27744, rolling out to testers in the Canary Channel.

This way, Qualcomm’s new chips can run more kinds of apps that don’t have native ARM64 versions and, until now, weren’t usable with emulation. It could even enable games that use AVX2, like Starfield and Helldivers 2, to work on Windows on Arm.

With this update, Microsoft’s emulator will open up support for 64-bit x86 software to use processor extensions like AVX, AVX2, BMI, FMA, and F16C. However, it says 32-bit software still won’t...

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